Book DONE!

I just pressed send on the final file of my book! YAY! Still a lot to happen before it is actually published in the Spring of 2013, but most of the heavy lifting on my side is done! I'm going to go buy myself a lot of chocolate and spend the rest of the day doing nothing productive whatsoever. And after that, who knows, I might just start posting on this blog with some sort of regularity again.

Late autumn goodbye

I was down in Ohio, visiting my parents this past weekend.

It was a gorgeous late autumn day, and the trees and water in their back yard were breathtaking.

The 12 acres I grew up on back up to Lake County's (poorly named) Hell Hollow Park which is dramatic and beautiful.

We moved to this spot when I was 8 years old, and since I moved out at 19, I don't get back as often as I like.

But every time I do, I step out of the car, hear the waterfalls, smell the cool, moist woodland air, and feel at peace.

My parents are  moving in a few weeks down to where they've always wanted to live, in the high country of Western North Carolina. They're selling the land to the park, so more people will be able to enjoy this idyllic spot I spent my childhood running around in.

I'm happy for them, and very happy I'll always be able to come back and visit this place in its new life as part of the park, but it was also a little bittersweet, saying goodbye.

These woods were not just my playground, they were my church, my place to be alone. In special, secret spots, I figured out who I am, what I believe, how I want to live my life. I cried, rejoiced, wrote long, long letters to dear friends.

Standing in those special places this weekend, I looked at myself, and was very happy. I love who I am, how I am living my life, happy knowing that wherever life takes me, I'll always have deep roots reaching back to that rich, woodland soil.

Goodbye.

Building a greenhouse

It started with a drawing on our chalkboard counter top...

 And now an actual structure has been going up in the back yard.

I now have a greenhouse! It is small (8' x 16') but big enough to have a lot of fun, and surprisingly inexpensive. This year, at least, I'm going to leave it unheated, so I won't be able to grow in it quite year-round, but it will seriously extend my growing season, and let me overwinter almost-hardy plants. SO much fun!

Yet another reason to GROW your dinner.

This article in Wired caught my eye a while ago, and I'm just now getting around to blogging about it. It talks about some studies which indicate that the more we work for our food, the better it tastes, the more we enjoy it. Most interestingly, this isn't just a higher level psychological feeling of satisfaction -- the same apparently holds true for mice, indicating this may be a pretty fundamental part of how brains work.

That's interesting, but it gets more interesting. Work with brain scanning indicates that obese people get less pleasure from food than people with a healthy weight -- implying that they may be overweight because they have to eat more to get the same level of satisfaction.

In this article, they put that together to say that taking time to cook dinner will make it taste better, and therefore help you eat less and be healthier.

I'm inclined to take it a step further: A home cooked, home GROWN meal is quite the peak of deliciousness, leaving one so flushed with pleasure the thought of an oreo orgy can hardly come to mind and McDonalds sounds simply repulsive.
 As if I needed another reason to keep vegetable gardening...

Gardening and the internet

This is really only tangentially related to plants and gardening, but I've been thinking lately about the internet.
My thinking was started by a series are articles in Slate by a man who has decided to give up the internet for 4 months. The articles are full of references to the internet as an addiction, and a time waster. His latest is titled, If You Grow Up on the Internet, Are You Better Equipped To Use It Responsibly? About how young people feel about the internet.

Which got me thinking. I grew up with computers, but the internet didn't really come into my life until my late teens. And do I regret it? Not even a tiny little bit. I just wish I had had it sooner. I discovered (or, rather, rediscovered) gardening in my mid-teens. I didn't know a single gardener, with the exception of my uncle who lived 7 hours away and I saw maybe annually. I got stacks of books out of the library, and started learning to garden by trial and error. Mostly error.

Then, the internet came along -- at the library, at school, and I had access to information. To people. I traded plants and information with people on garden web. Most importantly, I discovered the incredible community of people that is The Rose Hybridizers Association, where I learned most of what I know about my deepest gardening passion, plant breeding. Let me emphasize that: In roughly another year I will have a PhD in Plant Breeding and Genetics. I have certainly learned a lot about the topic here in graduate school. The fundamentals, though, the real foundation of what breeding is and (perhaps most importantly) why I LOVE it, I learned from the amazing people on-line.

And there is so much more... I have a small collection of great garden reference books, but I have at my finger tips the ultimate reference of all, Google. I can, in moments, learn of an incredible new species of plant, get professional and amateur reviews of it, find a source to buy it from, find out how many chromosomes it has, and virtually anything else anyone knows about it.

I would certainly be a gardener without the internet (I don't think anything could keep me from being a gardener) but I wouldn't be nearly as good at it. Certainly I loose a little time watching cute kitten videos on you tube, but that is more than made up by the fact that I can learn in minutes what would have taken me hours to find in the library.

Long live the internet!

More evidence: Gardening is the next big thing

Guess where I took these images (sorry about the crappy quality -- low light, and lots of people make for difficult shooting):

Some kind of home and garden show? A plant geek event? Nope: Check out this one:

A cool little three wheeled thing surrounded by cyclamen? Yes folks, we're talking about The North American International Auto Show in Detroit. And it was jam packed with plants -- iris reticulata, tulips, daffodils, magnolias, cyclamin, boxwoods, taxus, forsythia.... Plants are officially going mainstream, people.
And thank goodness for that! I'm NOT a car person -- as in, I was 22 when I got my drivers license... took the test the same week I took the GRE for grad school. Aced the GRE. Almost failed the drivers test. Even now I bicycle if at all possible. My partner, on the other hand, built his first car from scrap when he was 15. So we went to the autoshow. The plants were the only thing that kept me awake!

Though I do have to admit, there were a couple cool cars: I loved this cute little all-electric pickup truck! Perfect for quick trips to the nursery.

And I begrudgingly admit that this car was pretty cool too... it also costs more than twice what I paid for my HOUSE.

Global warming and transparency in science

A couple news stories this week that got me thinking.

First, this interview on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday:

In the NPR piece, Scott Simon moderated a sort of debate between Freakonomics (and Super Freakonomics) author Steven Levitt and Peter Frumhoff of The Union of Concerned Scientists. Levitt advocates geoengineering to fight global warming in the short term while we get CO2 under control -- things like pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the earth. I'm personally skeptical, though a little intrigued, but Frumhoff's arguments against it were... well, fairly shocking. He started arguing that it wouldn't work, but when Levitt pushed back, he basically confessed he thought it was dangerous mostly because it would make it harder to get people behind reducing carbon emissions. In other words: talking about this will make it harder to get people to do what I want them to, so it is better to just pretend it isn't an option at all, especially as world leaders are meeting to try and agree to significant emission reductions.

In response, Levitt asked: "And if the U.S. were to meet the standards that Barack Obama has proposed, what will happen to the temperature of the Earth over the next 50 years?"

There was a long, uncomfortable pause, and then finally Frumhoff admitted: "Well, we're going to see some warming."

In other words: Carbon reduction, on any scale being talked about, will not solve the problem in the short term, while geoengineering possibly could. But we mustn't talk about it.

Now, geoengineering certainly could have lots of other negative effects as well, it seems far from a perfect fix or even a practical one -- but shouldn't we at least be having a discussions about it? We hear so much about how horrible severe global warming could be, so shouldn't we at least consider all the options, no matter how wacky they may seem? Yet the attitude taken by Frumhoff is frankly antidemocratic: don't tell people all the options in case they decide on a different option than the one we, the experts, think is best. Don't discuss the pros and cons of emission reduction vs. geoengineering, just accept as decreed that carbon emission reductions are the one true way.

Even more disturbingly anti-Democratic is this story in Science about leaked private e-mails between top climate scientists. A lot of disturbing content, most strikingly this particular quote from CRU (Climate Research Unit) Director Phil Jones referring to requests from global warming critics for a file of raw global temperature data. He wrote: "I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." Other e-mail exchanges regarded trying to keep controversial research findings out of the 2007 IPCC report, saying "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is."

Basically, the e-mails contain various versions of the same story: Rather than releasing data that they feared could be misinterpreted, they made an effort to control the message so only information that supported their conclusions were made public.

The factual omissions revealed by these e-mail exchanges are apparently not that damaging to the actual science -- the scientists seem to have good reasoning behind drawing the conclusions they have from their data, but the choice to simply promulgate their conclusions rather than the full course of reasoning that lead to those conclusions is very disturbing -- beyond disturbing. If I, in my research in grad school, tried to hide data which didn't support my conclusions I would be kicked out of school, and rightly so: Transparency is at the very heart of science. You always present the data that supports your conclusions, AND the reasons you might possibly be wrong.

I consider myself an environmentalist, and have never considered myself a doubter of global warming, but this story has frankly shaken me. What these scientists have done is put political dogma ahead of honesty and truth. How then are we to trust them? They think, I guess, that because global warming is so serious, it is too important to debate. I feel quite the opposite: For something that important we need all the facts and all the debate we can get.